Huawei unveils Honor 7A as its new budget phone in China

Huawei has a new phone for the Chinese market and, as always, it’s kinda familiar. This one though is under the company’s sub-brand Honor.

The Honor 7A is built from the DNA of its Huawei siblings and the closest resemblance is the Y7 Prime (2018) and Nova 2 Lite, but the Honor 7A has a metal frame, high-gloss back coating, and a slightly smaller display.

The phone sports a 5.7-inch HD+ display with an aspect ratio of 18:9 to keep up with the trend. It’s powered by a Snapdragon 430 processor (just like the two phones mentioned earlier) with two memory and storage options: 2GB+32GB and 3GB+32GB.

There’s a dual rear camera setup made up of a 13-megapixel main sensor and a 2-megapixel secondary sensor for depth sensing. It can shoot portrait photos with bokeh and capture Full HD videos. An 8-megapixel front camera shoots selfies with a dedicated LED flash.

A fingerprint reader is located at the back of the phone but face unlock is also available using the front camera. A sizeable 3000mAh battery is inside the device but there’s no mention of fast charging through its micro-USB port.

Other specifications of the phone include a triple-card slot for two SIM cards and a microSD card, 3.5mm audio port, FM radio, and LTE connectivity. The phone pretty much covers the basics.

The Honor 7A is for sale in China at CNY 800 (US$ 130) for the 2GB+32GB version and CNY 1,000 (US$ 160) for the 3GB+32GB version. It will be available at Huawei Mall, Tmall, and JD.com.

Facebook has a short film about their fight against misinformation

Facebook has something new for their users and it’s not a fun feature on the website or cute stickers for your story selfies. The biggest social networking site is determined to show that they’re serious about fighting misinformation may it be fake news or misleading posts, so they made a short film.

The Facing Factsshort film is an 11-minute video explaining the social network’s past and current thinking about managing posts on your News Feed, the challenges of keeping things neutral, and their methods of fighting off using machine learning.

Of course, they wanted to tell their side of the story and that’s why the short film also stresses the difficulties Facebook faces in handling two billion users.

“It would be impossible to review everything by hand.”

The film also acknowledges Facebook’s mistakes in the past and it’s pretty informative if you’re not familiar with Facebook’s saga against misinformation crawling on their platform. With the new measures they are doing, they wanted to convince users that they’re now doing the right thing until it’s time to change the strategy again.

The new Snapdragon 710 promises flagship specs for midrange phones

While everyone is hunting for the latest Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm’s midrange line is slowly catching up from behind. The newly announced Snapdragon 710 promises flagship features for the midrange phones that will eventually carry the chip.

Built on a 10nm chip, the Snapdragon 710 features timely upgrades for midrange AI, cameras, and display tech. According to Qualcomm VP for Product Management Kedar Kondap, the new processor offers “technologies and features previously only available in [their] premium-tier mobile platforms.”

In terms of AI, the chip ups the ante with a multi-core AI engine. Compared to previous models in the series, the Snapdragon 710 promises twice the performance for AI features. The upgrades will inevitably help with voice commands, gesture controls, and contextual photography.

Speaking of photography, the Snapdragon 710 includes the Qualcomm Spectra 250 image signal processor, which enhances camera tech. This hopes to improve the camera’s stabilization, low light capabilities, and noise reduction. This includes the popular AR emojis rapidly growing across the industry.

Also, for the first time, the Snapdragon midrange series will support 4K HDR viewing. The feature brings the best out of the midrange sector’s limited screen capabilities. Hopefully, this also brings substantial upgrades to the types of screens available for the sector.

Additionally, the new Snapdragon model can maximize both connectivity and battery life. With a new Snapdragon X15 LTE modem, the chip can support up to 800Mbps of 4G download speed. Similarly, the chip’s optimized architecture can reduce power consumption by up to 20 percent. If that’s not enough, it also supports the new Quick Charge 4+, which drastically reduces charging time.

Starting now, Qualcomm has opened the Snapdragon 710 for phone makers worldwide. We can expect compatible phones by the second half of the year.

Apple, Xiaomi lead wearable market during the start of 2018

Smartwatches may not be as in demand as smartphones, but the top smartphone manufacturers are also in the lead in the wearable market. We’re talking about Apple and Xiaomi which both garnered 18 percent of the market share according to the latest data from Canalys.

Apple leads the whole wearable market during the first quarter of 2018 with 3.8 million shipments and most of these are the latest Watch Series 3. Xiaomi is close behind with 3.7 million shipments and their most popular watches are the basic Mi Band models.

Trailing behind is Fitbit with an 11 percent market share followed by Garmin with 7 percent. Huawei also made a significant 6 percent cut in the pie.

We might not feel it, but wearable shipments grew 35 percent compared to the same quarter last year with a total 20.5 million units. Full-blown smartwatches managed to grab 80 percent of the total revenue despite managing just 43 percent of the overall shipments.

It looks like the price is not an issue among wearable customers, especially for Apple clients. The Cupertino company’s key smartwatch is the LTE-enabled Watch 3 series which adds a new revenue stream because of the data subscription it requires.

During the same quarter, Apple has 59 percent of the cellular-enabled smartwatch market while Garmin is the second smartwatch vendor.